Business Challenge

In the case of a big manufacturing company, technology was silently acting as a choke point. Decades of using SAP ECC 6.0 with its on-premise structure have helped to achieve stability, but they could not do much for agility. In times when there was an expansion in operations in new geographies and new products, the current set-up fell short of the requirements.

Another important reason that made transformation imperative was the nearing support end-date of 2027 for SAP ECC.

The infrastructure of the client’s business environment consisted of outdated technology, necessitating regular and expensive upgrades and raising the costs related to infrastructure by almost 60% per year. However, the challenges didn’t end there:

• Increased time in completing financial reports
• Greater difficulty in maintaining complex custom ABAP code
• Less flexibility to accommodate expansion
• Risk of late migration plans

Approach

Star Systems had a clear approach regarding how to handle the modernization exercise. Rather than a complete rebuild, Star Systems proposed that the best approach was to embrace a Brownfield migration whereby the client could continue using their business processes while getting the benefits of the new and improved software platform.

Firstly, Star Systems carried out a comprehensive system assessment to determine the current data schema, custom developments, and dependencies.

Following this, there was a move to SAP S/4HANA, which would be running on an IBM Power Virtual Server, due to its superior performance.

Execution was done through various phases, including:

HANA database migration: Moving away from the current database to use SAP HANA in supporting the transactional processing of the application.

Custom ABAP remediation: Adjusting the legacy code in order to fit in with the new environment.

Business process optimization: Optimizing the current business processes to suit the new software.

User acceptance testing (UAT): All processes were checked to see if they ran flawlessly.

Impact on Business

The transition process was completed in just five months, well before the six-month deadline.

• Faster financial closing cycle by 40%, allowing better business decision making.
• HANA query performance improved by a factor of two, which was much needed for reports and analytics.
• Simplified infrastructure with increased scalability on the cloud.
• ERP solution that aligns with SAP’s roadmap in the long run.